Lanier, Turing and Imaginary Friends

27. August 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Life, Philosophy, Teaching, Technology · Tags: , , ,

In the previous post, I talked about how Lanier observes the meaning of the Turing Test.  The Turing Test takes a computer and a human, puts them in a room and asks another human outside the room to interact with both through printed notes and the human outside is supposed to figure out which is the human and which is the computer.  If the human outside cannot distinguish between the human and the computer, then the computer has passed the test.

While some think that this test shows computers are conscious, intelligent, and/or persons, Lanier is concerned that it demonstrates how we’ve degraded these concepts.  I want to present a third possibility that I think may be a better assessment of the situation.  It is not that computers exemplify these concepts, nor that we’ve degraded the concepts, but rather, we’ve allowed our imagination to fill in gaps in order to see things as human, but applying it to computers becomes a gross misapplication.

We use imagination to fill in the gaps of our experience of other people all the time, and I think that we can say that social media and other technology has encouraged that and made it even more natural to do so.  We are only given a limited amount of information about a person, but using our imagination, we are able to see them as more than the information we have, and as an actual person.  With our imagination, we construct in our heads what it would be like to be that person.  To use Lanier’s lock-ins, we do so much of our interaction with people in non-face-to-face means (and even face-to-face means may still require imagination) that we’ve become locked-in to the mindset of using our imagination to fill in gaps that we don’t know/can’t experience about the other person.  We’ve gotten so used to using our imagination with that basic level of information to see the other as a person that when we get the same type of feedback from a computer, we start to fill in a person around the computer.  Our imagination is used to making those kinds of jumps and so it naturally does that when we encounter a computer that is imitating human things.

As we have more face-to-face interactions with individuals that are more than words on a screen or sounds waves transmitted digitally, it allows us to use less imagination and more memories to fill in the gaps.  We have relationships with the person and not the person as we imagine him/her to be.  The problem comes when we’ve gotten so used to using imagination that memories aren’t necessary to our interactions with other individuals.

As I mentioned in one of my first posts, I hope this blog generates discussions that can continue on into your lives, with the people you live in community with.  I hope that these discussions create memories and eliminate the need for imagination to fill in gaps in your relationships with one another.  I realize that you can’t have those kinds of relationships with everyone, but I think Kierkegaard is right that we need them with some people.  We need to live life with people who we know see the world and experience the world, with whom we create memories and start to understand how they see and experience the world.  The best use of on-line interaction is to feed the face-to-face interaction.  However, if we can abandon the face-to-face interaction, thanks to our imagination filling in the gaps that should be filled with memories, maybe we have returned to our childhood, and live in a world full of imaginary friends.

Why Critchley gets Kierkegaard wrong… but not completely.

18. August 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Philosophy · Tags: , ,

On August 8, Simon Critchley wrote an editorial in the New York Times called “The Rigor of Love,” arguing that given Kierkegaard’s concepts of faith and love, those without faith may actually be more faithful than those with faith.  In a nutshell, I think Critchley gets the spirit of Kierkegaard while missing on the particulars. Given his particular understanding of the Kierkegaardian concepts of faith and love, he comes to a reasonable conclusion, but the problem is that he get those concepts wrong.

For Kierkegaard, the concept of love is intimately attached to God.  Kierkegaard attaches love of neighbor as an expression of love for God. There is a sense that every relationship you have with others becomes an expression of your relationship with God. Additionally, it is important that the command is not to love everyone, but to love your neighbor. For Kierkegaard, that means that you are to love the person in front of you, not with a preferential love, but with an agape love that puts the concern for the genuine good of the other as the most important focus. You are not to act with any concern of what you might receive from the other, but solely for the other, again, as an expression of your love for God. Because of the intimate connection between neighbor love and love for God, the idea that someone who is not striving to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength could love one’s neighbor with the commanded neighbor love would be absurd for Kierkegaard. It may be possible to love with another kind of love, but Kierkegaard calls those kinds of love preferential love, not neighbor love.

Here is one thought experiment that I gave in my thesis of the application of this love. Imagine you’re on a boat with your wife. Some correctly convicted death row inmates are also on the boat, en route to their execution the next day. The boat starts to sink and is full of life boats but each life boat only holds two people. (Obviously I’m a philosopher as the qualifications have started to get a bit ridiculous.) You are able to get one of the life boats. According to Kierkegaard, your neighbor is the person closest to you. So you are to help the first person that you come to, even if it is one of those convicted killers and you know that your wife is out there, for that killer is your neighbor. (Now, of course, I put a footnote that if I kept paddling through the people and came upon my wife, I could give her my spot on the lifeboat and she could push the criminal out to give me that spot.) :) This love is blind in one sense, as it does not care who is in front of you, but on the other hand, it is anything but blind, for you are to help that particular person in the way that they need to be helped, which cannot be generalized beyond the term “love”.

I think Critchley misses some of the nuances of this aspect of Kierkegaard. The thing that messes up Critchley more is his understanding of faith. He gets some of the nuances, but makes the mistake of explaining faith in Kierkegaard’s work on love. By working with an incomplete understanding, he allows faith to be something that it is not. For Kierkegaard, faith is about the relationship between the infinite Creator and finite man. It does demand everything, but can never be met. It is a relationship of like and unlike, as Critchley explains. However, the Incarnation is the key for Kierkegaard, for it is in the Incarnation that the king became a beggar in order to truly win the heart of the peasant girl, as he explains in The Sickness Unto Death. Just as the king could win the girl’s respect or fear if he presented himself in his full glory, or she could have been with him in order to experience the benefits of being queen, had God done anything but became one of us, there was no guarantee of our love, although He certainly could have gotten our respect, fear, or played to our desire for rewards. By becoming man, God, in a sense, leveled the playing field, so that we could enter into a genuine loving relationship with Him. Without the Incarnation, the door is opened for Critchley’s ideas.

Critchley did do a good job of emphasizing the void of denominations or creed for Kierkegaard’s idea of faith. For Kierkegaard, faith is deeply personal. In Fear and Trembling, we’re given an attempt at an explanation of faith from someone who does not have faith. From his perspective, faith looks irrational. Faith looks like a leap. Faith looks like uncertainty. However, faith is about the relationship between the individual and God. Whereas the ethical form of life is about being able to justify your actions to the community, faith is unexplainable. When God tells you something, it cannot be explained to anyone else, for faith is about the individual’s relationship with God. In fact, since language is an expression of the ethical life, that is, the need to justify and communicate, faith cannot be accurately expressed in language. When God tells you something, the only person before whom you need to justify your actions is the one who commanded you to act. Because the person of faith is only concerned about his relationship with God, he will sometimes do things that are considered unethical by the community in which he lives. To the observer of this person, it may look like he is utterly unconcerned with ethics, and is an aesthete, a person only concerned with his own pleasures. This observation would be incorrect, but it is understandable how one would come to this observation, because there is nothing observable that would lead one to think otherwise for it is all about the individual’s relationship to God.

I think it is here where we can see how Critchley comes to his incorrect observation. The person without faith may actually look incredibly similar to Kierkegaard’s person of faith. Based on this observation, he wants to basically equate the two, but he misses the fact that the person of faith acts as he does because of his relationship with God. This intimate, personal relationship changes everything, although it may not look that way to an outside observer, especially one without faith.

I think Critchley identifies an important connection that should be recognized more often than it is, as we often strive to live our faith in a way that dismisses the fact it is a relationship that will create unease and uncertainty, which creates a disconnect between those with faith and those without faith when in reality, there is much more shared than either side typically wants to admit. Now there is still a fundamental difference between the two, but while the experiences are similar, our experience of uncertainty has meaning and significance to it that cannot be found otherwise.

While Kierkegaard does a wonderful job of emphasizing the need for the individual to have a relationship with God, I think he misses the role of true Christian community in his thought. Kierkegaard tends to see the Church as an expression of the ethical life rather than the life of faith, and given the lack of disconnect between church and state, in Denmark it was. However, the Church does not have to be connected to the state, and therefore, true Christian community can play an important role for the person of faith. Following Wittgenstein, a group of persons of faith can all participate in the same language game that allows them to express meaning to those who have comparable relationships, although each individual has his/her own unique relationship with God. This language game will not make sense to anyone outside of faith, but to those with true faith, it will make perfect sense. While Wittgenstein has other interesting thoughts that would explain how people of faith can convey the meaning of that faith to those outside faith, that will be for another time, as that is a huge tangent that is a paper in itself (that I have basically written a couple years ago).

Ultimately, Critchley looks at Kierkegaard’s work and sees that people without faith look to demonstrate the characteristics of faith better than faithful people today.  However, he makes the mistake in taking this observation to mean that the people without faith have faith more than those with faith.  It follows from Kierkegaard that the faithless might look very much like the faithful.  But to equate the two is a mistake.  Instead, as Christians, we should look to demonstrate that we share in the human experience of uncertainty just like everyone.  The difference is that our uncertainty is a relational uncertainty rather than an absolute uncertainty.

Am I already undermining my project?

09. July 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: Life, Philosophy, Teaching · Tags: , ,

I have a list of articles that have spurred some thinking about the use of technology that I’m processing, particularly with regard to teaching, but also with regard to life.  The first of these articles on which I will comment is “Kierkegaard’s ‘Mystery of Unrighteousness’ in the Information Age” by Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward.

I’ve spent many hours studying Kierkegaard’s work over the past 5 years between my master’s thesis and classes here at Baylor.  Kierkegaard was a very complex individual on many levels.  However, a recurring theme in his work was to encourage individuals to embrace what it means for each individual to be an I, a subject who embraces his/her own individuality.  I cannot be another person, nor can I be reduced to a member of a group and be defined by that group.  Instead, I am a unique individual and I must not try to eliminate that which makes me that individual, although that work is hard to do.  Kierkegaard believes that face-to-face interactions are the best way to communicate with other individuals in a way that the respective individualities are preserved and enhanced.  Even when Kierkegaard wrote, more than 150 years ago, he had great reservations about technology and the way that it can negatively influence both our self-perception and our perception of others, largely due to the inability to provide a necessary context for an actual relationship to occur.

While the entire article is worth reading, it can be summed up in this quote:

The analysis we offer here does not intend to suggest that we should always expect face-to-face interaction to disappoint the efforts of online social practice. What it does intend is to emphasise is the importance of face-to-face encounter for determining the validity of the online interaction. This makes the Kierkegaardian challenge to our technological motives striking. Kierkegaard insists on an essential caveat to society’s often unbridled enthusiasm for transferring traditional social contexts into a technologically mediated state. This transference often occurs not as preparation for eventual face-to-face interaction, but rather as a surrogate for it.

In today’s world, we are often quick to embrace technology.  In the last month, hundreds, if not thousands, of people waited hours in line, some overnight, for the new iPhone.  When something happens in life, many immediately think, “This will make a great Facebook status” or “How can I tweet this in 140 characters or less?”  There are many other examples of ways that we have embraced technology across our lives.

However, if Kierkegaard is right concerning the necessity of face-to-face communication in order to fully communicate and develop genuine relationships with one another, how do these technologies do that?  Do technologies serve as a supplement to our face-to-face interactions, tiding us over between those interactions, or have they replaced those interactions for the most part?

It is not uncommon for me to send an e-mail or text message to my wife at some point throughout the day to discuss plans or express some sappiness towards her.  However, we have a context created by our daily lives together that is supplemented by these communications.  My family lives over a thousand miles away right now and we’ll see each other two or three times a year.  However, we have phone conversations on a regular basis, not to replace those times when we see each other, but to supplement those times.  Kierkegaard (and Prosser and Ward) would not take issue with these uses of technology, and would probably say that these are the proper uses of technology.

However, the article written by Prosser and Ward was written before the age of Facebook and Twitter.  These two additions to the discussion have changed the way many of us view technology.  I find myself at fault in my use of both technologies.  I have interacted face-to-face with nearly everyone that I am Facebook friends.  However, I have had conversations with people who agree that Facebook has essentially replaced the need for class reunions.  I already keep in closer touch with those I’m close to, and I’m Facebook friends with those that I’m not, so I know what is going on in their lives.  In this case, I have allowed Facebook to provide the false appearance of a relationship with these individuals, some whom I have not had any interaction in over ten years, apart from accepting a friend request on Facebook.

Twitter presents a different technological “abuse” by me, in that I still haven’t gotten the hang of “tweeting,” but I follow many different people, most of whom I have never even met.  I don’t respond to tweets, but sometimes I feel like I know the people tweeting, even though all I know of them is their on-line presence, which is necessarily a limited view of who they are.  Both technologies can be used as a supplement to the genuine interactions, but are often used to supplant those interactions.

In the classroom, technology can serve as a supplement to the classroom interactions or it can serve as a replacement of those interactions for students.  I’m sure that there are students who have insightful things to say in class, but are afraid to speak up in class, but would be willing to post those thoughts on-line.  Hopefully this interaction can serve as a starting point to build upon for that student to where he/she can start to feel a sense of security and speak up in class and create those face-to-face interactions.  In the same way, if the discussion only happens on-line and never in the classroom, I think we have to wonder if the value of the individual students and the value of learning in community are being lost in the classroom.  While more can be said along these lines, I have future posts in mind that will address these thoughts more thoroughly.

All of this discussion leads me to the title of this post.  I am blogging my thoughts about things.  It is possible that many of the people who read this post have never met me, nor will they ever meet me in a face-to-face setting.  You only know about me what I have chosen to make known to you.  Even if you friend me on Facebook, that too is a mediated interaction.  When I’m on-line, you only know about me what I choose to let you know.  You will inevitably see parts of me, but it is unlikely that you will construct those parts as I actually am.  Yet, I want there to be value in this medium of communication.  I don’t want this blog to be a means of communication that can be divorced from who I am as a communicator.

With that being said, I hope you get to know me in this blog on some level, but I must admit that I have a sense of guardedness in my on-line interactions.  However, I hope that discussions that start here can carry over into face-to-face interactions between you and me.  Whether those happen on campus at Baylor, at conferences, or other random places, I hope to be able to meet many who read this blog.  Even more than for myself, I hope this blog can start discussions that do not remain on-line but carry over into our individual lives, spurring face-to-face interactions with those whom we live and engage in community together.  If my blog gets you talking more with those you work, teach, and/or learn, I’ll feel like I’ve accomplished something worthwhile.